7 ms·

> Plenty of people don't have apnea because they are overweight; instead, they are overweight because they suffer apnea. A lack of sleep means a lack of energy

> Plenty of people don't have apnea because they are overweight; instead, they are overweight because they suffer apnea. A lack of sleep means a lack of energy. You're body compensates by getting food energy. Too much stigma around what should just be understood as a biological mechanism.

pc86 3y ago
This is stated as biological fact when it's simply not. Sleep apnea doesn't change the laws of thermodynamics - if you are gaining weight you need to eat less or move more. It's not stigma, it's simply the way it is for the vast majority of people (the rest being covered by rare hormonal conditions that require a doctor to treat). Being tired may cause you to eat more but being tired isn't making you gain weight, it's the overeating that is.
- throwaway11460 3y ago
  Being tired changes how your body uses and stores energy. Your body might be permanently trying to save up for bad times (because the times are always bad) and so you're getting fat even if you eat very little.
  - serf 3y ago
    can you point to examples of otherwise healthy individuals under moderate to high calorie restriction that gain weight due to chronic poor quality sleep? it's not something I have ever been made aware of, and I don't understand how it could be the case.
    - throwaway11460 3y ago
      A lot of things about your body changes when you're extremely tired. I don't have anything specific to link - it's just my own personal experience and what the doctor said. In my own case, I had to eat much more than I theoretically should because my body wasn't able to process the food as well as it should (less than 50% of usual efficiency). And yet I was fat - not obese, but definitely not thin. The body redirected some of my food to storage even though I didn't have enough energy (glucose etc) as measured by blood screening. And it didn't use the reserves properly when I stopped eating.
    - pc86 3y ago
      What is mentioned in a couple of these comments about your body's response to external stressors changing how it allocates calories is absolutely true, but it's at the margins. If you're at maintenance caloric intake and ± a couple hundred calories a day, over years this can have an effect. But it's not going to meaningfully impact a 500-1000 calorie/day deficit to the point where you're still gaining weight.
      - jf22 3y ago
        I believe there is a study where people ate at a 25% deficit but had high glucose and still gained weight.
        riversflow 3y ago
        Is this the study you were referring to? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7898726/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7898726/ > Effects of moderate sleep restriction during 8-week calorie restriction on lipoprotein particles and glucose metabolism Because the conclusion starts with, > In this study, 8 weeks of calorie restriction with and without sleep restriction of less than 90 minutes per day on 5 days with 2 days of ad libitum sleep per week, resulted in similar degrees of weight loss Let me be clear that sleep deprivation doesn’t seem to be good for your circulating lipoprotien levels or insulin sensitivity based on that study, but they didn’t gain weight.
    - nonameiguess 3y ago
      Not gonna try to find a specific example, but just from having listened so much to the Stronger by Science and Iron Culture podcasts for the past few years, there have at least been numerous studies and metas over the last decade examining the effects of sleep on weight loss and weight gain as it pertains to bodybuilding goals. I don't recall any having showed an impact on the rate of gain or loss but duration of sleep opportunity definitely has an impact on the quality of gain or loss. That is, you lose more muscle and less fat losing weight while sleeping poorly, and gain more fat and less muscle when gaining weight while sleeping poorly.
  - vmladenov 3y ago
    By this logic, one could run an army legion without food supplies simply by keeping them sleep deprived.
    - throwaway11460 3y ago
      Uh, no? The whole point is that the entire system breaks down. So you get sleep deprived humans who can't process food properly and have no energy as a result. Sounds like a big failure.
- brnt 3y ago
  The body is far more complex than simple thermodynamics however, and to pretend the dozens of biological feedback loops are fully under ones control betrays a lack of understanding. Reducing getting fat to thermodynamics is like reducing computing to adding numbers. While that may be the basic building block, only a fool thinks that merely by comprehension of the add operator, one is also able to debug hugely complicated soft- and hardware stacks.
  - pc86 3y ago
    I actually like the computing and adding numbers analogy because "Sleep apnea makes people overweight" is the nutritional equivalent of saying "1 + 1 = hammer." The root cause of weight gain is either overeating or lack of sufficient exertion in almost every case. Sleep apnea may absolutely cause someone to overeat in part because of those dozens of biological feedback loops you mention. But that doesn't mean that sleep apnea makes people gain weight. It's still too much food at the end of the day.
    - pkoird 3y ago
      I'd like to contribute by saying that even when you are sleeping, body burns calories for various neurobiological processes. That automatically translates to bad sleep equals decreased calorie utilization (than a healthy baseline)
    - balfirevic 3y ago
      > It's still too much food at the end of the day. It's all four fundamental physical forces actually, if you want to go that route. Which isn't helpful.
    - criddell 3y ago
      If overeating has causes, then it's not really a root cause.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - 3y ago
- moritzwarhier 3y ago
  Lack of sleep and stress are associated with overeating, and not only that, they also trigger hormons that promote the body to prioritize building up fat reserves. I'm on mobile and don't have time to link, but a quick google search should give medical studies on this. The "energy" thing is a simplification, but as a description of how this feels, it is apt in my view. This is not about thermodynamics.
- schwartzworld 3y ago
  > Being tired may cause you to eat more but being tired isn't making you gain weight, it's the overeating that is. Potato pot-ah-to.
  - pc86 3y ago
    Maybe the end result is the same but it's an important distinction. It's too easy to say "oh yeah I'm gaining weight because I have sleep apnea" while you're snacking on donuts at your desk at all. The people who are tricked into believing it think that if they "cure" their apnea they'll be back to a healthy weight when a) they could be at a healthy weight despite their apnea with some effort, and b) they're building habits that even if their apnea disappears a year from now they will stay at the same weight.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nerb 3y ago
  You reference the laws of thermodynamics, but I'm not sure which laws you're applying to the human body? Is it the first which requires the measured system to be closed which a human body is not? Is it the second about entropy always increasing? Or is it the third defining perfect entropy at 0 Kelvin? Bringing up thermodynamics as a generalization for biological systems is pseudo-intellectual. We aren't all equal machines that take in a fuel stock and output work. How do you account for differences in peoples' resting metabolic rates? How do you account for the difference in available energy in the foods you chose to eat, and in the differences in peoples' biological processes that extract that energy? Stress is a common hormonal modifier that impacts how the body stores fat; no where near a "rare" condition that many people experience nowadays, and yeah caused by things like sleep apnea. You betray your own argument anyway by adding an the "hormonal condition" exception (I don't see any exceptions referenced in the laws of thermodynamics, lol). Biology has more dimensions than you are choosing to look at, and using thermodynamics as a "gotcha" when it comes to others' bodies reveals your lack of understanding and intuition.
  - foobarian 3y ago
    Yes the first one. The energy contained in ingested food is far and away the dominant metabolic input. There is no need to get into the weeds of various details of how that breaks down; the main problem is that calories are way too cheap in the modern day and age, and people's habits and instincts developed in far different eras lead to easily ingesting more than is expended. Yes the OP is not wrong, but it's not a very useful argument unless we're going to roll back the modern civilization.
- lr4444lr 3y ago
  He's not entirely wrong, but perhaps not for the stated reason. Sleep deprivation can skew the ghrelin/leptin hormonal balance, which can make appetite control difficult.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  The body never processes 100% of calories from food the way a bomb calorimeter does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorimeter#Bomb_calorimeters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorimeter#Bomb_calorimeters, but depending on how much energy it needs it processes more or less. It's entirely possible to eat less food and have your body decide that food is more scarce and choose to strip more calories from your food than it was when you were eating more. Thermodynamics is an asinine thing to bring up in a system that can reconfigure its efficiency on the fly to optimize for different environments.
  - tehjoker 3y ago
    All that does is change the lower limit. The system has a compensation limit, below that you lose weight.
    - BobaFloutist 3y ago
      Sure, but it's still unhelpful to say that overeating is what makes you gain weight when other people eating the same amount and with the same amount of activity are not gaining weight, especially when eating less could cause you to gain more weight until you hit a threshold. I don't think many people disagree with "If you starve yourself enough your body will eventually start burning fat", they disagree that it's as simple as "anyone gaining weight is necessarily doing it to themselves by eating more than other people". And starving yourself isn't easy. It's one of the top like five things your body is designed not to let you do. So how on earth is it helpful when people are talking about factors that can influence your appetite and can literally influence the number of calories your body chooses to extract from the exact same food to say "just eat less lol"? I might add that overwhelming research suggests that social pressure on people's weight causes people to gain weight. So even if you were right, bringing it up would be counterproductive.
      - Izkata 3y ago
        > when other people eating the same amount and with the same amount of activity are not gaining weight, especially when eating less could cause you to gain more weight until you hit a threshold That's part of the "calories out" side of the equation, that few people put in the effort to find (if they even know how). And I've found online estimators aren't very useful here, you need to find it for yourself - they say mine is around 1600 when it's actually more like 2200. Ignoring half of CICO just because people only like talking about CI doesn't make it false.
- david-gpu 3y ago
  > if you are gaining weight you need to eat less or move more You could do a little experiment: set up an alarm to wake you up 15-30 times every hour while you try to sleep. That is what moderate sleep apnea does to you. Try this for, say, a year. See what happens to your overall health and your weight in particular. Don't forget to "eat less or move more".
- SamBam 3y ago
  People love to think of the body as a simple energy-in->energy-out equation, but it's definitely more complex than that, as the body can change what it's deciding to hold on to and what it's deciding to burn or expel. I am one of those that stayed skinny as a rake throughout my childhood and mid-adulthood (in my mid-40s I'm starting to become more normal sized). I wasn't particularly active, and I ate voraciously -- third or fourth helpings of pasta bowls. But the food never stuck to my ribs. (And it wasn't a worm or anything -- the whole side of my mother's family is the same, while my dad's side is the opposite.) No one should look at my body and say "clearly he is exercising more than he is eating" because it wouldn't have been true at all, and yet that's what the simplistic energy-in and energy-out conclusion would say.
  - aliasxneo 3y ago
    I can second this. I get routinely mistaken for a runner because of my size. I do strive for 10k steps a day, but generally, my activity levels would not easily reflect my BMI.
  - nvy 3y ago
    >People love to think of the body as a simple energy-in->energy-out equation, but it's definitely more complex than that, as the body can change what it's deciding to hold on to and what it's deciding to burn or expel. If calories-in/calories-out didn't work, then it would be impossible to starve to death. Where people get confused is that the number of calories changes as your metabolism speeds up or slows down. If you are ingesting fewer calories than your body requires, you will lose some combination of fat and muscle. There is no possible way for this to be false.
    - SamBam 3y ago
      It's the flip side that is quite possible to be false. You can certainly eat more calories than your body requires and yet not gain weight. Your gut could absorb less, so you excrete otherwise-digestible carbs. You could have a parasite. Further, you could be burning more calories without doing more exercise or otherwise doing anything "useful" with the energy -- i.e. having a higher basal metabolic rate. These calories can be burned doing all sorts of things that the person has no control over: you could have a higher core body temperature, you could be spending more energy on cellular repair and other cellular processes, you could be synthesizing more hormones, you could be spending more energy metabolizing foods, etc etc. These latter causes are obviously on the "energy out" side of the equation, but they do not relate to things under our control. Further, they can change with age, stress, and (relevant to TFA) sleep. So a body that has been coasting by eating 2200 calories per day and never gaining a pound could suddenly change and start putting on weight, even though the person's diet and activities haven't changed. The point is that two people could eat the exact same calories, and do the exact same exercise, and one of them go up in weight and the other go down. The "calories in vs calories out" idea usually simplistically makes people think this couldn't be true, because "calories out" is simplistically taken as "exercise." The reason I shared my story is that so many people just quote "calories in vs calories out" as if both sides of the equation were perfectly under control, and those people are also often like me: they find it easy to keep the pounds off (because of a high metabolic rate) and so they look down on people who have trouble shedding weight and figure that those people could live just like them. But those heavier people could well be eating less and doing more exercise than them.
- Modified3019 3y ago
  People do not live on a thermodynamic knife edge. There is a very wide leeway of excess intake that allows our body to burn energy “wastefully” or store it based on a hideously complex set of factors. The idea that everyone is fat because we’re somehow more sinful (gluttonous, slothful) than in the past has repeatedly failed to resolve any problem except for the need for smug people to pat themselves on the back for using thermodynamics in a sentence.
- vikingerik 3y ago
  This is the truth, even if people don't like it so you're receiving downvotes for it. Weight gain or loss is calories in vs calories out. Nobody's body is so special that you're defying thermodynamics and creating mass that you didn't intake as food. And that's definitely not changed by sleep apnea. That said, there is the point that calories ingested doesn't necessarily equal calories absorbed, and sleep apnea could indeed affect that. But if you're relying on that thin margin for the difference between staying at a healthy weight or not, that's a fragile state of affairs, and you could fix your diet more to be more comfortably on the right side of it. (My own, unscientific, hypothesis: far too many people are indeed unknowingly relying on that. I think a ton of people cram in 3k calories a day while absorbing 2k because there's just too much mass for the body to process, and then when they do cut ingestion to 2k, that doesn't change absorption and that's why they don't lose weight. (Numbers here are approximate.) It's actually pretty amazing how little food the human body actually needs and how little mass 1500 calories is.)
  - vmladenov 3y ago
    > and how little mass 1500 calories is Or how much, depending on what you’re eating. It would be physically impossible for me to eat 1500 calories of lettuce in a day (10kg worth) but it definitely aids in “feeling full” when added to a meal.
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  Sidenote, i'm in your camp and agree with you - BUT, hypothetically there's a side to this i've not seen discussed here. That you can lose sleep and it causes a weight gain, with no other change to your CI or CO. Notably, you were previously not processing a portion of your potential CI and it was just passing through you. In that case you didn't change how much you ate or how many calories passed your lips, but you did change your CI by way of changing your sleep. Is this a real example or a contrived edge case from a software dev? No clue. I'll let better minds decide that hah.
lordswork 3y ago
I thought it was more complex than this, something like lack of sleep disrupting hormones that regulate feelings of hunger and fullness.
- HumblyTossed 3y ago
  I'm sure it is. But the point should still stand.
sandworm101 3y ago
>> A lack of sleep means a lack of energy. You're body compensates by getting food energy. I saw this ironically during military basic training. Lots of exercise, but very little sleep. The body compensates by keeping blood sugar levels high. I was one of the many that actually gained weight during basic training. The eating routine of three solid meals eaten very quickly also was not healthy.
- jerlam 3y ago
  My doctor wore one of those continuous glucose monitors for a while and reports something similar. He considers himself an endurance athlete and his blood sugar levels were always a bit high when he was regularly exercising, but once he took some time off, his blood sugar levels dropped to "normal" levels once his body realized it wasn't under so much stress.
  - xarope 3y ago
    that concurs with my anecdotal sample size = 1 study, where I have gone for 3.5 days without sleep before, and just keep feeling hungry and snacking every hour or so. (for those asking what happened after 3.5 days, I basically started getting hysterical - literally just laughing at nothing - and when I was finally able to get to a bed, it took about 2 hours of staring at the ceiling before my body finally decided I was no longer under stress, and allowed me to fall asleep).
alwiejrlai 3y ago
Absolutely. When I was in the Navy, working 80-100hrs/wk, we were served four meals a day, every six hours, like clockwork. You can substitute sleep with calories for days or weeks at a time. It's terrible for you, I do not recommend it, but it can keep you going.

pc86 3y ago

This is stated as biological fact when it's simply not. Sleep apnea doesn't change the laws of thermodynamics - if you are gaining weight you need to eat less or move more. It's not stigma, it's simply the way it is for the vast majority of people (the rest being covered by rare hormonal conditions that require a doctor to treat). Being tired may cause you to eat more but being tired isn't making you gain weight, it's the overeating that is.

throwaway11460 3y ago
Being tired changes how your body uses and stores energy. Your body might be permanently trying to save up for bad times (because the times are always bad) and so you're getting fat even if you eat very little.
- serf 3y ago
  can you point to examples of otherwise healthy individuals under moderate to high calorie restriction that gain weight due to chronic poor quality sleep? it's not something I have ever been made aware of, and I don't understand how it could be the case.
  - throwaway11460 3y ago
    A lot of things about your body changes when you're extremely tired. I don't have anything specific to link - it's just my own personal experience and what the doctor said. In my own case, I had to eat much more than I theoretically should because my body wasn't able to process the food as well as it should (less than 50% of usual efficiency). And yet I was fat - not obese, but definitely not thin. The body redirected some of my food to storage even though I didn't have enough energy (glucose etc) as measured by blood screening. And it didn't use the reserves properly when I stopped eating.
  - pc86 3y ago
    What is mentioned in a couple of these comments about your body's response to external stressors changing how it allocates calories is absolutely true, but it's at the margins. If you're at maintenance caloric intake and ± a couple hundred calories a day, over years this can have an effect. But it's not going to meaningfully impact a 500-1000 calorie/day deficit to the point where you're still gaining weight.
    - jf22 3y ago
      I believe there is a study where people ate at a 25% deficit but had high glucose and still gained weight.
      - riversflow 3y ago
        Is this the study you were referring to? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7898726/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7898726/ > Effects of moderate sleep restriction during 8-week calorie restriction on lipoprotein particles and glucose metabolism Because the conclusion starts with, > In this study, 8 weeks of calorie restriction with and without sleep restriction of less than 90 minutes per day on 5 days with 2 days of ad libitum sleep per week, resulted in similar degrees of weight loss Let me be clear that sleep deprivation doesn’t seem to be good for your circulating lipoprotien levels or insulin sensitivity based on that study, but they didn’t gain weight.
  - nonameiguess 3y ago
    Not gonna try to find a specific example, but just from having listened so much to the Stronger by Science and Iron Culture podcasts for the past few years, there have at least been numerous studies and metas over the last decade examining the effects of sleep on weight loss and weight gain as it pertains to bodybuilding goals. I don't recall any having showed an impact on the rate of gain or loss but duration of sleep opportunity definitely has an impact on the quality of gain or loss. That is, you lose more muscle and less fat losing weight while sleeping poorly, and gain more fat and less muscle when gaining weight while sleeping poorly.
- vmladenov 3y ago
  By this logic, one could run an army legion without food supplies simply by keeping them sleep deprived.
  - throwaway11460 3y ago
    Uh, no? The whole point is that the entire system breaks down. So you get sleep deprived humans who can't process food properly and have no energy as a result. Sounds like a big failure.
brnt 3y ago
The body is far more complex than simple thermodynamics however, and to pretend the dozens of biological feedback loops are fully under ones control betrays a lack of understanding. Reducing getting fat to thermodynamics is like reducing computing to adding numbers. While that may be the basic building block, only a fool thinks that merely by comprehension of the add operator, one is also able to debug hugely complicated soft- and hardware stacks.
- pc86 3y ago
  I actually like the computing and adding numbers analogy because "Sleep apnea makes people overweight" is the nutritional equivalent of saying "1 + 1 = hammer." The root cause of weight gain is either overeating or lack of sufficient exertion in almost every case. Sleep apnea may absolutely cause someone to overeat in part because of those dozens of biological feedback loops you mention. But that doesn't mean that sleep apnea makes people gain weight. It's still too much food at the end of the day.
  - pkoird 3y ago
    I'd like to contribute by saying that even when you are sleeping, body burns calories for various neurobiological processes. That automatically translates to bad sleep equals decreased calorie utilization (than a healthy baseline)
  - balfirevic 3y ago
    > It's still too much food at the end of the day. It's all four fundamental physical forces actually, if you want to go that route. Which isn't helpful.
  - criddell 3y ago
    If overeating has causes, then it's not really a root cause.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - 3y ago
moritzwarhier 3y ago
Lack of sleep and stress are associated with overeating, and not only that, they also trigger hormons that promote the body to prioritize building up fat reserves. I'm on mobile and don't have time to link, but a quick google search should give medical studies on this. The "energy" thing is a simplification, but as a description of how this feels, it is apt in my view. This is not about thermodynamics.
schwartzworld 3y ago
> Being tired may cause you to eat more but being tired isn't making you gain weight, it's the overeating that is. Potato pot-ah-to.
- pc86 3y ago
  Maybe the end result is the same but it's an important distinction. It's too easy to say "oh yeah I'm gaining weight because I have sleep apnea" while you're snacking on donuts at your desk at all. The people who are tricked into believing it think that if they "cure" their apnea they'll be back to a healthy weight when a) they could be at a healthy weight despite their apnea with some effort, and b) they're building habits that even if their apnea disappears a year from now they will stay at the same weight.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nerb 3y ago
You reference the laws of thermodynamics, but I'm not sure which laws you're applying to the human body? Is it the first which requires the measured system to be closed which a human body is not? Is it the second about entropy always increasing? Or is it the third defining perfect entropy at 0 Kelvin? Bringing up thermodynamics as a generalization for biological systems is pseudo-intellectual. We aren't all equal machines that take in a fuel stock and output work. How do you account for differences in peoples' resting metabolic rates? How do you account for the difference in available energy in the foods you chose to eat, and in the differences in peoples' biological processes that extract that energy? Stress is a common hormonal modifier that impacts how the body stores fat; no where near a "rare" condition that many people experience nowadays, and yeah caused by things like sleep apnea. You betray your own argument anyway by adding an the "hormonal condition" exception (I don't see any exceptions referenced in the laws of thermodynamics, lol). Biology has more dimensions than you are choosing to look at, and using thermodynamics as a "gotcha" when it comes to others' bodies reveals your lack of understanding and intuition.
- foobarian 3y ago
  Yes the first one. The energy contained in ingested food is far and away the dominant metabolic input. There is no need to get into the weeds of various details of how that breaks down; the main problem is that calories are way too cheap in the modern day and age, and people's habits and instincts developed in far different eras lead to easily ingesting more than is expended. Yes the OP is not wrong, but it's not a very useful argument unless we're going to roll back the modern civilization.
lr4444lr 3y ago
He's not entirely wrong, but perhaps not for the stated reason. Sleep deprivation can skew the ghrelin/leptin hormonal balance, which can make appetite control difficult.
BobaFloutist 3y ago
The body never processes 100% of calories from food the way a bomb calorimeter does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorimeter#Bomb_calorimeters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorimeter#Bomb_calorimeters, but depending on how much energy it needs it processes more or less. It's entirely possible to eat less food and have your body decide that food is more scarce and choose to strip more calories from your food than it was when you were eating more. Thermodynamics is an asinine thing to bring up in a system that can reconfigure its efficiency on the fly to optimize for different environments.
- tehjoker 3y ago
  All that does is change the lower limit. The system has a compensation limit, below that you lose weight.
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    Sure, but it's still unhelpful to say that overeating is what makes you gain weight when other people eating the same amount and with the same amount of activity are not gaining weight, especially when eating less could cause you to gain more weight until you hit a threshold. I don't think many people disagree with "If you starve yourself enough your body will eventually start burning fat", they disagree that it's as simple as "anyone gaining weight is necessarily doing it to themselves by eating more than other people". And starving yourself isn't easy. It's one of the top like five things your body is designed not to let you do. So how on earth is it helpful when people are talking about factors that can influence your appetite and can literally influence the number of calories your body chooses to extract from the exact same food to say "just eat less lol"? I might add that overwhelming research suggests that social pressure on people's weight causes people to gain weight. So even if you were right, bringing it up would be counterproductive.
    - Izkata 3y ago
      > when other people eating the same amount and with the same amount of activity are not gaining weight, especially when eating less could cause you to gain more weight until you hit a threshold That's part of the "calories out" side of the equation, that few people put in the effort to find (if they even know how). And I've found online estimators aren't very useful here, you need to find it for yourself - they say mine is around 1600 when it's actually more like 2200. Ignoring half of CICO just because people only like talking about CI doesn't make it false.
david-gpu 3y ago
> if you are gaining weight you need to eat less or move more You could do a little experiment: set up an alarm to wake you up 15-30 times every hour while you try to sleep. That is what moderate sleep apnea does to you. Try this for, say, a year. See what happens to your overall health and your weight in particular. Don't forget to "eat less or move more".
SamBam 3y ago
People love to think of the body as a simple energy-in->energy-out equation, but it's definitely more complex than that, as the body can change what it's deciding to hold on to and what it's deciding to burn or expel. I am one of those that stayed skinny as a rake throughout my childhood and mid-adulthood (in my mid-40s I'm starting to become more normal sized). I wasn't particularly active, and I ate voraciously -- third or fourth helpings of pasta bowls. But the food never stuck to my ribs. (And it wasn't a worm or anything -- the whole side of my mother's family is the same, while my dad's side is the opposite.) No one should look at my body and say "clearly he is exercising more than he is eating" because it wouldn't have been true at all, and yet that's what the simplistic energy-in and energy-out conclusion would say.
- aliasxneo 3y ago
  I can second this. I get routinely mistaken for a runner because of my size. I do strive for 10k steps a day, but generally, my activity levels would not easily reflect my BMI.
- nvy 3y ago
  >People love to think of the body as a simple energy-in->energy-out equation, but it's definitely more complex than that, as the body can change what it's deciding to hold on to and what it's deciding to burn or expel. If calories-in/calories-out didn't work, then it would be impossible to starve to death. Where people get confused is that the number of calories changes as your metabolism speeds up or slows down. If you are ingesting fewer calories than your body requires, you will lose some combination of fat and muscle. There is no possible way for this to be false.
  - SamBam 3y ago
    It's the flip side that is quite possible to be false. You can certainly eat more calories than your body requires and yet not gain weight. Your gut could absorb less, so you excrete otherwise-digestible carbs. You could have a parasite. Further, you could be burning more calories without doing more exercise or otherwise doing anything "useful" with the energy -- i.e. having a higher basal metabolic rate. These calories can be burned doing all sorts of things that the person has no control over: you could have a higher core body temperature, you could be spending more energy on cellular repair and other cellular processes, you could be synthesizing more hormones, you could be spending more energy metabolizing foods, etc etc. These latter causes are obviously on the "energy out" side of the equation, but they do not relate to things under our control. Further, they can change with age, stress, and (relevant to TFA) sleep. So a body that has been coasting by eating 2200 calories per day and never gaining a pound could suddenly change and start putting on weight, even though the person's diet and activities haven't changed. The point is that two people could eat the exact same calories, and do the exact same exercise, and one of them go up in weight and the other go down. The "calories in vs calories out" idea usually simplistically makes people think this couldn't be true, because "calories out" is simplistically taken as "exercise." The reason I shared my story is that so many people just quote "calories in vs calories out" as if both sides of the equation were perfectly under control, and those people are also often like me: they find it easy to keep the pounds off (because of a high metabolic rate) and so they look down on people who have trouble shedding weight and figure that those people could live just like them. But those heavier people could well be eating less and doing more exercise than them.
Modified3019 3y ago
People do not live on a thermodynamic knife edge. There is a very wide leeway of excess intake that allows our body to burn energy “wastefully” or store it based on a hideously complex set of factors. The idea that everyone is fat because we’re somehow more sinful (gluttonous, slothful) than in the past has repeatedly failed to resolve any problem except for the need for smug people to pat themselves on the back for using thermodynamics in a sentence.
vikingerik 3y ago
This is the truth, even if people don't like it so you're receiving downvotes for it. Weight gain or loss is calories in vs calories out. Nobody's body is so special that you're defying thermodynamics and creating mass that you didn't intake as food. And that's definitely not changed by sleep apnea. That said, there is the point that calories ingested doesn't necessarily equal calories absorbed, and sleep apnea could indeed affect that. But if you're relying on that thin margin for the difference between staying at a healthy weight or not, that's a fragile state of affairs, and you could fix your diet more to be more comfortably on the right side of it. (My own, unscientific, hypothesis: far too many people are indeed unknowingly relying on that. I think a ton of people cram in 3k calories a day while absorbing 2k because there's just too much mass for the body to process, and then when they do cut ingestion to 2k, that doesn't change absorption and that's why they don't lose weight. (Numbers here are approximate.) It's actually pretty amazing how little food the human body actually needs and how little mass 1500 calories is.)
- vmladenov 3y ago
  > and how little mass 1500 calories is Or how much, depending on what you’re eating. It would be physically impossible for me to eat 1500 calories of lettuce in a day (10kg worth) but it definitely aids in “feeling full” when added to a meal.
unshavedyak 3y ago
Sidenote, i'm in your camp and agree with you - BUT, hypothetically there's a side to this i've not seen discussed here. That you can lose sleep and it causes a weight gain, with no other change to your CI or CO. Notably, you were previously not processing a portion of your potential CI and it was just passing through you. In that case you didn't change how much you ate or how many calories passed your lips, but you did change your CI by way of changing your sleep. Is this a real example or a contrived edge case from a software dev? No clue. I'll let better minds decide that hah.

lordswork 3y ago

I thought it was more complex than this, something like lack of sleep disrupting hormones that regulate feelings of hunger and fullness.

HumblyTossed 3y ago
I'm sure it is. But the point should still stand.

sandworm101 3y ago

>> A lack of sleep means a lack of energy. You're body compensates by getting food energy. I saw this ironically during military basic training. Lots of exercise, but very little sleep. The body compensates by keeping blood sugar levels high. I was one of the many that actually gained weight during basic training. The eating routine of three solid meals eaten very quickly also was not healthy.

jerlam 3y ago
My doctor wore one of those continuous glucose monitors for a while and reports something similar. He considers himself an endurance athlete and his blood sugar levels were always a bit high when he was regularly exercising, but once he took some time off, his blood sugar levels dropped to "normal" levels once his body realized it wasn't under so much stress.
- xarope 3y ago
  that concurs with my anecdotal sample size = 1 study, where I have gone for 3.5 days without sleep before, and just keep feeling hungry and snacking every hour or so. (for those asking what happened after 3.5 days, I basically started getting hysterical - literally just laughing at nothing - and when I was finally able to get to a bed, it took about 2 hours of staring at the ceiling before my body finally decided I was no longer under stress, and allowed me to fall asleep).

alwiejrlai 3y ago

Absolutely. When I was in the Navy, working 80-100hrs/wk, we were served four meals a day, every six hours, like clockwork. You can substitute sleep with calories for days or weeks at a time. It's terrible for you, I do not recommend it, but it can keep you going.